NIH Funding FactsTutorial
Welcome! In this tutorial, we will highlight the major features of RePORT Funding Facts. Funding Facts was designed to provide quick access to facts when you have a very specific question about NIH extramural funding, such as the total amount of funding or number of awards for a specific institute or funding mechanism.
Funding Facts can be accessed by clicking the icon below the RePORT image carousel or in the Quick Links section of the home page.
We’d first like to bring your attention to the “Frozen” icon in the upper right area of the page. Anywhere this appears on the RePORT web site, it meansthe data provided on the page are generated from frozen files created by NIH at the end of each fiscal year. This provides a consistent source of data—the query results you see today will be the same tomorrow, next week, or next year. In contrast, other portions of the RePORT website, such as the RePORTERdatabase, use the most up-to-date recordsthat incorporate revisions made to grant awards after the end of the fiscal year.
Queries to the Funding Facts database can be made in two different ways. One way is to simply type in a question. We’ll return to this natural language query in a couple of minutes. First, we will demonstrate an Advanced Search, where you can select all of the filters available to narrow your search for the specific number you’re looking for.
The filters available include the topic—or type of data you’re looking for—NIH institute or center, funding mechanism, activity codes, type of award (such as new, competing renewal, supplement, or noncompeting award), and fiscal year.
To change one of these filters, click on the select button to the right and a selection box will appear. The types of data or topics available in Funding Facts include numbers of applications, average award sizes, total amounts of funding, numbers of awards, funding amounts found in official NIH and IC budget mechanism tables, and success rates.
We will show you a sample query to find success rates, so we will clear out these entries, check only success rates and click the select button to set this filter.
We will also select a specific institute by opening the institute or center selection box, clearing the checkbox for “All NIH” and selecting instead the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute.
These are the options for Funding Mechanism. In this example, we’re not concerned about funding mechanism, so we will leave all checked and click the Cancel button.
The default selection for activity code is “All (in aggregate).” “In aggregate” means that the funding fact returned will be a single number for all activities combined. This is different than selecting “All Activities,” which will return a separate number for each of the activity codes shown in the list. We are interested in only R01s, so we’ll clear the “All (in aggregate)” box and select “R01.”
We could get the aggregate success rate for R01s, which would be the success rate combining new, competing renewals, and competing supplements, but we are interested in only new R01 applications (sometimes referred to as “type 1” applications). So we will clear the “All Types (in aggregate) box and select “New.”
Finally, we are interested in the trend over time, so we will select All Fiscal Years.
So, to summarize, we will search for success rates for NHLBI new R01 applications for all fiscal years. Click “Submit Query” to perform the search of the Funding Facts database.
In the “Statistic” column are the funding facts that we searched for—in this case, success rates for new NHLBI R01 applications. But you’ll notice that each figure is repeated three times. This happens because activity codes are nested within a hierarchy of funding mechanisms. So, an R01 is a non-SBIR/STTR research project grant, but an R01 is also a member of the larger categories of all RPGs and all Research Grants.
To get rid of these duplicate results, we can refine the query to specify only one of these funding mechanisms. So we return to the Advanced Search section, open the Funding Mechanism selection box, and select “Research Grants – RPGs.”
When we re-submit the query, the duplicate figures are removed and we can see the success rates of new NHLBI R01 applications from 2001 to 2011. To use these in a spreadsheet, click the Export button.
You may have noticed this column called “Source.” This column provides hyperlinks to the original source of the dataif it’s available. For example, these NIH-wide RPG success rates come from table 202 of the NIH Data Book. Clicking on the link will open that page of the Data Book.
With practice, Funding Fact queries can be formulated very quickly, but you still might find it easier to simply type in a question. You can do this in the left-hand query box. To replicate the search we just created, we can type in our question “What are the success rates of new NHLBI R01 applications?” And either click “Submit Query” or simply hit the return button.
As you can see, this replicates the first query we performed using the Advanced Search filters, where each figure is repeated several times. We can correct this by specifying the funding mechanism in our question. Rather than referring simply to “R01 applications,” we can say “R01 RPG applications” and this will produce a more satisfying result.
Below the query input box are sample queries. Here are some other valid queries… say while the other valid queries scroll: Note that well-defined sentences aren’t required, and the standard two-letter codes can be used for NIH institutes and centers instead of their acronyms. Instead of typing in a full sentence like the one we used in our example, we could have simply entered “HL new R01 RPG success rates.”
Finally, if your mobile device has voice recognition capabilities, some queries can be entered that way. For example “GM RPG awards 2011” will return the number of research project grants awarded by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences in fiscal year 2011.
This concludes the Funding Facts Tutorial. If you have any questions or comments on Funding Facts, please address them to .
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